Cheese Board, the oldest food collective in Northern California. It's a pizza shop, as well as a place to get nice quality cheeses and bread. It is located at 1504 Shattuck in Berkeley. Photo of Ursula Schulz behind the counter helping customers with cheese.
Event on 9/26/03 in Berkeley.
CRAIG LEE / The Chronicle

Photo: CRAIG LEE

Cheese Board, the oldest food collective in Northern California....

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Photo: CRAIG LEE

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Photo: CRAIG LEE

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Cheese Board, the oldest food collective in Northern California. It's a pizza shop, as well as a place to get nice quality cheeses and bread. It is located at 1504 Shattuck in Berkeley. Photo of Sophie Sepehri, age 2, bends down to kiss Luca Reed, a 9-month-old baby. Sophie did not know the baby and just walked in the store and did that by instinct. Her mother, Hedieh Sepehri, said that she is just affectionate by naturally. Luca's mother, Karine Reed, and brother, Sam, age 2, are in the background at the counter. Vicki Salzman of the Cheese Board, is waiting on them behind the counter.
Event on 9/26/03 in Berkeley.
CRAIG LEE / The Chronicle

Photo: CRAIG LEE

Cheese Board, the oldest food collective in Northern California....

A cheese shop grows in Berkeley / After 36 years, a venerable workers' collective is still going strong

In 1967, Elizabeth and Sahag Avedisian opened a tiny cheese store on Vine Street in North Berkeley, around the corner from the future Chez Panisse. Despite the owners' inexperience, the shop thrived, and the Cheese Board's success became a harbinger of the Bay Area's food awakening.

In 1971, driven by their belief that social justice required sharing wealth, the Avedisians converted the business into a worker-owned collective, bringing their six employees in as partners.

More than three decades later, the collective endures, its 40 members jointly operating the Cheese Board's bakery, cheese shop and pizzeria, having long ago relocated from Vine Street to the current Shattuck Avenue site. A seeming anachronism in an entrepreneurial age, the business is now a Berkeley institution, supplying the well-fed locals with farmstead cheeses, sourdough baguettes and oatmeal scones.

In a new book, "The Cheese Board Cookbook: The Collective Works" (Ten Speed Press, 2003), members share recipes, stories and history, shedding some light on how this unconventional enterprise operates. Even die-hard capitalists would have to acknowledge that the collectivists are doing something right.

"There's no hierarchy," says Michael McGee, who joined the collective in 1975. "The pay scale, the hourly rate, is exactly the same, whether you've been here 25 years or one year. The philosophy is that everybody's time is worth the same, no matter what your experience or age."

The flat hierarchy -- with each member's voice equal and everyone sharing equally in profits -- defines their collective, Cheese Boarders say. In contrast, a cooperative may have a decision-making general manager and varying rates of pay.

Separate, but equal

Opened in 1985, the Cheese Board pizzeria has its own members and operates almost independently of the bakery and cheese shop, although one side will help out the other in a pinch. In both businesses, everyone trains to do almost everything, including bookkeeping. The nine pizzeria members trade off running the register, making the dough, assembling pizzas and working the ovens. On the bakery-cheese side, a member's shift may include a few hours shaping and baking baguettes, a few hours behind the cheese counter and some time at the register.

The cross-training keeps members engaged and able to cover for others when needed. On the other hand, consistency wavers when every member takes a turn making bread. "We have 30 different people with 30 different aesthetics," admits Steve Sutcher, a member since 1979. "That's hard for a food store."

Standards are hashed out at meetings, where members can argue that the baguettes are getting too sour or the scones too dark. The monthly meetings are also the venue for approving major purchases, voting in new members or discussing policy changes, such as a recent controversial proposal to accept credit cards. The bigger the decision, the more strenuously the group seeks consensus.

"The benefit is that everybody's heard, and the drawback is that everybody's heard," says Ursula Schulz, a member since 1980. "It's frustrating sometimes. The process needs to include even the wackiest -- to me, the wackiest -- points of view. And we have to keep going until we meet in a place where we're all comfortable."

Counterculture ways

Even the cookbook project encountered opposition from those who worried that it would be self-aggrandizing. Similarly, the credit card proposal elicited a vigorous debate between those who saw the cards as a service to customers and those who wanted the collective to preserve its counterculture ways. Proponents argued that taking credit cards would enhance business because customers would purchase more. Others shuddered at encouraging such blatant consumerism. In the end, still far apart, members tabled the proposal, with advocates vowing that it would be back.

"I still believe this is the best way to work," says Guillermo Perez, a self-described former "at-risk kid" who first worked at the Cheese Board under its teen mentoring program and later joined the collective. "If we ever didn't make money, we would probably lower our wages and make sure everybody still had a job. We wouldn't fire the last person who came on."

After profit sharing, members make about $25 an hour, with generous benefits. A few years ago, they jointly purchased some country property in Mendocino County and built a cabin on it that all members share. They can fight as much as any dysfunctional family, says Perez, but even antagonists know that nobody's leaving and they have to get along.

Once a year, members have a bouillabaisse party at the beach "so we can remember we like each other," says Cathy Goldsmith, a member for eight years. And the disco ball dangling from the ceiling is a remnant from the annual New Year's Eve party, when the floor is cleared of work benches, the cheese counter becomes a bar, and members dance all night.

Out-spoken politics

Few retail businesses flaunt their politics as openly as the Cheese Board.

Members take May Day off and have been known to close the store so they can attend anti-war protests. A peace sign decorates the shop window. Every day, the store distributes about 40 free cheese sandwiches to homeless people, and a posted sign offers a discount to the disabled and "those in need." Seniors also get discounts that rise with their age. Centenarian customers -- and the store has a few -- shop free.

Several years ago, the collectivists voted -- after the usual fierce arguments -- to open the shop at 7 a.m. for coffee and pastries. The Morning Bakery, as it's known, has been hugely successful, forcing the collectivists to develop a large repertoire of scones, muffins, sticky buns and other breakfast baked goods. Customers with bicycle helmets and backpacks line up for lattes, and the sidewalk benches and tables fill with regulars savoring a newspaper and pastry.

At 10 a.m., the coffee setup is dismantled and the cheese counter is readied for duty. Members rearrange cheese displays, prepare new signs and wheel the olives out of the refrigerator. For the next eight hours, a rotating cast services the counter, handing out samples, suggesting, sleuthing. They will help customers through recipes, listen politely to the occasional lunatic,

and patiently guide indecisive patrons who take entirely too much time.

"I don't remember anything about it except it was orange," says one customer, seeking a cheese he had purchased before.

Another customer wants a cheese he recalls only as "St. Something-or- other." Prodded for more descriptors, he remembers that it was soft, leading the clerk to St. Andre and a Eureka moment.

"It's a treasure hunt," says Schulz, who works the cheese counter often. Customers come in asking for that cheese they had on their vacation in the Dordogne but can't remember what it smelled, tasted or looked like. Or, as happened twice on a recent day, they want "authentic Cheddar from the town of Cheddar," a product that doesn't exist.

Tastes are changing, members say, as both they and their customers become more discriminating. Sheep's milk cheese is on the rise, while sales of bland, unremarkable cheeses like Port-Salut and Havarti decline. "We've gotten snootier, for sure," says Schulz, although some members are dismayed that the shop carries cheeses that retail for more than $20 a pound.

Cheese soars

In the high-carbohydrate 1980s and '90s, cheese sales accounted for only 25 percent of store revenue, members say. Now, in a shift they attribute at least in part to the Atkins diet, cheese has soared to almost half of the business.

"Ten to 15 years ago, the bread was the exciting thing we were doing," says Sutcher. "There wasn't as much glory in cheese." Today, in this non- hierarchical shop, selling cheese has renewed prestige. Even founder Elizabeth Avedisian, now in her 70s, still works the cheese counter every Saturday. (Sahag Avedisian, her ex-husband, left the collective and the Bay Area several years ago.)

But it would be hard to convince the pizzeria members that anyone is having more fun than they are. A multicultural group, the team turns out 400 to 600 pizzas a day in five hours. The customer line can stretch past several storefronts to the produce market at the end of the block, and patrons routinely picnic on the grass of Shattuck Avenue's median strip, savoring their cheesy purchase on the spot.

Every customer gets an extra sliver, originally intended to compensate those whose slice was on the small side. "But inevitably, people said, 'How come I don't get a sliver?' " says Arthur Dembling, a pizzeria member of 12 years.

The popularity of the pizzeria might prompt a typical business owner to open another location, or to franchise, or to buy some delivery trucks. But Cheese Boarders think differently. Disinclined to grow but eager to promote the collective experience, they have nurtured and mentored the Ariz-

mendi bakery collective, which now has three Bay Area stores. The Cheese Board provided seed money, recipes and training but has no financial stake.

Future unknown

As for the Cheese Board's future, there is no five-year plan, only a sense that the members have created a self-perpetuating enterprise. All components of the business -- the cheese counter, the bakery, the pizzeria - - need more room, but members joke that the space committee has nowhere to meet. Whatever path the Cheese Boarders choose, it is sure to be hotly debated.

"We fight, argue, discuss and disagree, but in the end we learn how to work together," says Perez. "If someday I leave the Cheese Board, my attitude on how to work with different people and different opinions -- what I learned from this place -- I can take into the world."

CHEESE BOARD FAVORITES

With a cheese inventory that numbers in the hundreds, Cheese Board members have inevitably settled on some fallback choices that virtually every customer likes. Clients who don't have a clue what they want are usually offered, and almost invariably buy, some of the following top-selling Cheese Board cheeses:.

Cabot Cheddar

A moderately priced Cheddar from Vermont's largest producer..

Chevrot

A cylindrical Loire Valley goat cheese..

Fromager d'Affinois

A buttery double-cream French cow's milk cheese with a bloomy Brie-like rind..

Istara

A smooth, nutty, aged sheep's milk cheese from the French Pyrenees..

Prima Donna

An aged cow's milk Gouda from Holland with a butterscotch taste..

St. Agur

A moist, mild and creamy French cow's milk blue.

CHEESE DO'S AND DON'TS

Cheese merchants love to introduce customers to new cheeses, but they need help to match a client with the right cheese. To get the most satisfaction from your purveyors, Cheese Board members offer some do's and one don't:

-- Tell the merchant what you plan to use the cheese for. Is it for the cocktail hour, for cooking, or to accompany a specific wine?

-- Discuss your budget, if you have one.

-- Share your preferences. Say, "I usually buy and like Brand X, but I'm open to something different."

-- Ask for a taste, even of cheeses you buy regularly. Wheels can vary from one shipment to the next.

-- If you are adventurous, ask what cheeses the staff is enthusiastic about.

-- Don't come in two minutes before closing and expect a leisurely tour of the cheese case.

INSTRUCTIONS: Preheat the oven to 375º. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper or a baking mat.

Sift the flours, baking soda and baking powder together into the bowl of a stand mixer or a large bowl.

If using a stand mixer: Add the salt, brown sugar and oats to the bowl and mix with the paddle attachment on low speed until combined. Add the butter and cut it in on low speed for about 4 minutes, or until it is the size of small peas. Mix in the currants. Make a well in the center and add the cream and buttermilk. Mix briefly, just until the ingredients come together. Add a bit more buttermilk or cream if the dough seems too dry. Let the batter stand for 10 minutes.

If making by hand: Add the salt, brown sugar and oats to the bowl and stir with a wooden spoon until combined. Add the butter and cut it in with a pastry cutter or 2 dinner knives until it is the size of small peas. Mix in the currants. Make a well in the center and add the cream and buttermilk. Mix briefly with a wooden spoon, just until the ingredients come together. Add a bit more buttermilk or cream if the dough seems too dry. Let the batter stand for 10 minutes.

Place the dough on a generously floured surface. Pat it into a 2-inch- thick rectangle and dust the top with flour. Using a rolling pin, roll it into a 1-inch-thick rectangle. Fold the rectangle in half, short ends together, and roll it out again until it is 1 inch thick. Repeat this process a second time. Fold a third time and roll out into a rectangle with a final size of 6 by 12 by 11/4 inches thick.

Dip a 3-inch circular biscuit cutter or drinking glass into flour and cut out scones from the dough. Place the scones on the prepared pan about 2 inches apart. The scraps can be rolled out again and the process repeated until all the dough is used.

Brush the tops and sides of the scones with the beaten egg. Bake on the middle rack for 30 to 35 minutes, or until a rich, golden brown. Transfer the scones to a wire rack to cool.